The best PC gaming processor

A good gaming rig doesn't need the most expensive CPU.

Shares

It used to be that the most important component in your PC was the CPU—the Central Processing Unit if you want to go old school, or just 'processor' these days. The CPU was once responsible for nearly everything going on inside the big black box sitting under your desk. These days, the CPU is still a critical component—nothing can happen if you don't have some form of processor running the OS—but the performance gap between the fastest and most expensive processors and those that are 'good enough' keeps shrinking, all while the pricing gap is increasing. Other components like graphics cards have taken a more prominent role, at least when it comes to gaming PCs.

For PC gaming, this is actually great news. Most of us can get by just fine with a moderate processor. Core counts, cache sizes, and clock speeds continue to improve as the years roll by, but chances are if you have a desktop built any time in the past five years, it can play most games.

When building a new rig, you don't have to buy the most expensive processor around to have a great gaming experience. Today's desktop processors can handle just about any game you throw at them, and many can be overclocked to improve performance (at the cost of increase power, heat, and potentially noise). We've researched and tested all the latest CPUs, along with looking at previous generations, and these are the ones worth putting in your next gaming rig.

The best gaming processor

Handles even the most demanding PC games

Good overclocking potential to 4.6GHz and beyond

Z170 platform brings more PCIe lanes and new technologies

Lower stock clocks than Core i7-6700K

Lacks Hyper-Threading and 'only' has four cores

It's easy to get caught lusting after the highest performing processors—ten cores, 25MB of L3 cache, quad-channel memory … drool. Intel's dirty little not-so-secret is that most of those high-end features don't really do jack squat for the majority of games. Unless you're building a PC to also do things like video editing, image manipulation, software development, or creating an AI to take over the world—there's a very real chance that you'll be just fine with a far less costly CPU. That's where Intel's Core i5 line excels, nowhere more so than in their unlocked enthusiast part, the Core i5-6600K.

There was a time when each new generation of processors brought with it some major performance improvements. All you had to do was look at the clock speeds to know that a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 was going to leave the 1.6GHz Pentium 4 sucking wind. But then clock speeds hit a wall and even architectural improvements slowed down, and now we're mostly getting increasingly high core counts. The problem is there are many common tasks, including the majority of games, where having more than four CPU cores (logical or physical) doesn't really matter much. That makes this the best current CPU for most PC gamers.

Specs

Even when left at the stock settings of 3.5-3.9GHz, and paired with the currently fastest consumer GPU, the GeForce GTX 1080, we measured less than a three percent benefit compared to the faster Core i7-6700K. There is one exception, and it might become more important over the coming years: Hitman in DX12 mode ran 20 percent faster on the 6700K. The good news is that overclocking eliminates much of the gap, and with both Skylake CPUs running at 4.7GHz, seven of the eight games we tested performed essentially the same (within two percent), though Hitman was still 13 percent faster.

For gaming PCs, you'll also want to consider the resolution, settings, and graphics card you're using. The fastest CPU on the planet isn't going to turn a budget graphics card into a gaming monster, but at the same time a mainstream CPU isn't the best fit for someone rocking an SLI or CrossFire setup. If you're looking at GPUs in the GTX 970 to 1060 range (or lower), or R9 390X / RX 480 (or lower), you're more likely to hit graphics card limits than CPU bottlenecks. SLI and CF users on the other hand can benefit from the additional PCIe lanes offered on Intel's X99 platform (see below).

Our advice here is geared toward people building new PCs, because in our experience processor upgrades independent of a completely overhauled build are pretty rare. If you're wondering about the need to upgrade, any Core i5 from any of the past several generations of Intel chips should still be doing pretty well—you should look at your graphics card before considering a CPU (and likely motherboard and memory) upgrade. Generally speaking, a modern i5-6600K will outperform the previous generation's i5-4690K by 5-10 percent, the i5-4670K by 10-20 percent, an 'ancient' i5-3570K by 15-30 percent, and the positively stone age i5-2600K by 20-40 percent. That's a fair step up from the 2nd and 3rd Gen Intel parts, but overclocking shrinks all of those margins, and any graphics card below a GTX 980/R9 390X is still going to be the bigger roadblock to liquid smooth framerates.

There are other reasons to consider upgrading, of course. It's far easier to find high capacity DDR4 memory than DDR3 or DDR2 memory, for example, and modern Z170 (and other 100-series) motherboards include some useful new features like additional PCIe lanes from the PCH, USB 3.1 support, and M.2 NVMe storage. That last item is great for people that need speedy storage, but again, gaming doesn't really hit storage all that much, so any moderate SSD is usually sufficient.

While the i5-6600K is our pick for the overall best gaming processor, it's not perfect. For example, users that do a lot of heavy multitasking, including things like Twitch streaming while playing games, may find the Hyper-Threading of the i7-6700K useful, and moving to a 6-core part might even pay off. Also keep in mind that the upcoming Kaby Lake processors (7th Gen Intel Core) will apparently get a new chipset, which means investing in Skylake as a long-term platform will be a dead end. But Intel has only been getting 5-10 percent faster than the previous generation with each new CPU family for a while now, and Kaby Lake is likely to continue that pattern.

The best budget gaming processor

Not noticeably slower than i5-6600K in most games

Runs on Intel's latest LGA1151 platform

No overclocking support or Turbo modes

Only dual-core, but Hyper-Threading helps

Suppose you're not planning on building the fastest gaming rig on the planet—you just want something decent that won't break the bank. Among other things, that means you're not likely to stuff in an expensive graphics card, which means games are even more likely to be limited by your GPU of choice. The good news is that not only can you save money, you don't even have to sacrifice modern features in the process—and power requirements can be quite a bit lower.

The question is which CPU is best: Core i3-6100, Athlon X4 860K, or FX-6350? Those three are the most promising budget CPUs, ranging from around $70 / £63 to $120 / £110 in price, which is a pretty wide gamut, but differences in performance can be equally large. For gaming purposes, choosing between these three chips actually ends up being pretty easy. AMD's Athlon X4 860K is basically the same as their A10-7870K, only without the integrated GPU. It's the slowest of the three chips, with the i3-6100 beating it by around 25 percent in gaming performance—and that's using a GTX 980 graphics card (RX 480 and GTX 1060 would perform similarly). The i3-6100 likewise beats the FX-6350 by around 10 percent, at significantly lower power use, and thus claims the budget CPU crown.

Specs

Dropping down to Intel's Core i3 line ends up being an interesting compromise in features. You lose two of the CPU cores found in the i5-6600K, along with half the L3 cache, but Hyper-Threading is enabled giving you two logical cores to go with the physical cores. Turbo Boost is also disabled, so the chip runs at a stead 3.7GHz under load—higher than the base clock of the 6600K, but lower than the turbo clock.

There's also no official overclocking support, and while ASRock did enable a form of overclocking, you're generally better of just getting the 6600K and calling it a day. The i3-6100 does drop the TDP down from 91W to 51W, however, with is pretty significant.

The good news is that even with all the above changes, performance ends up being quite respectable. In heavily threaded workloads the i5-6600K is up to 70 percent faster, but in lightly threaded workloads the gap drops below ten percent. For games, using a GTX 980 as the baseline running 1080p Ultra settings, performance is also within ten percent of the more expensive i5-6600K. Not a bad showing at all for Intel's entry-level Core i3 part.

Depending on your graphics card, even the i3-6100 might prove more than enough for your gaming needs—it's almost certainly capable of maxing out a GTX 960 / R9 380 or lower graphics card in most games. We personally tend to go with around a 2:1 ratio on cost of GPU vs. CPU, though, meaning a GTX 1060 or RX 480 would be a great pairing for a modest gaming solution. Since there's also no official support for overclocking, you can also look at motherboards with the H110/H170 chipsets, and decent models start at not much more than $50 / £50, with well-equipped ATX boards under $100 / £100.

The biggest concern with Intel's Core i3 processors is future games that may start putting additional CPU cores to better use. We've seen this with Ashes of the Singularity, Hitman, and Doom when running DX12 or Vulkan, and if DX12 really catches on in the next couple of years a 2-core/4-thread chip could become a liability. But given the price, we'd take that risk—you can always upgrade to a Core i5 or i7 part in the future if it becomes necessary.

This is why we also recommend not going any lower down the CPU pecking order. Our previous pick the Pentium G3258 had its time, but today we wouldn't recommend investing in a purely dual-core processor, particularly with DirectX 12 starting to leverage more CPU cores.

The best high-end gaming processor

Six full cores plus Hyper-Threading

Very overclockable

Good for streaming and multitasking

Power hungry, especially when overclocked

Not many games use more than four cores

Determining where to spend money on any new PC build is a balancing act between price, performance, power requirements, and features—and you can only choose two or three of those four areas. For high-end builds, cost is rarely in their favor. In the case of the i7-6800K, we're sacrificing price as well as power use in order to gain performance and features.

What will the X99 platform get you that Skylake can't? Besides more processor cores, the only other major benefit will be the additional PCIe lanes—28 for the 5820K/6800K, or 40 for all other LGA2011-3 CPUs. (You could even run one of the Xeon processors, though pricing isn't usually in their favor.) The additional PCIe lanes won't usually result in better gaming performance, with one notable exception: SLI and CrossFire builds, which we'll come back to in a moment. Perhaps more importantly, there are plenty of non-gaming scenarios where the additional cores can really pay dividends.

Specs

Let's be clear and state that for single graphics card configurations used purely for gaming, there's little benefit to running a 6-core processor right now. In fact, the 4-core i7-6700K beats the 6-core (and 8-core and 10-core) processors by anywhere from 3-6 percent at stock settings, and overclocking only changes that gap slightly (3-4 percent). But that's running a single GTX 1080 GPU, without any background tasks going on. If you like running live streams of your gaming sessions, depending on how you handle the video encoding (CPU-based or GPU-based), the extra cores can help smooth things out.

Choosing the best high-end processor, albeit with an eye toward gaming, ends up being one of the more difficult tasks. There are several candidates worth considering, and at the head of the list are the Core i7-6700K, Core i7-5820K, and Core i7-6800K. Each has pros and cons, for example the 6700K is the fastest gaming processor in most situations, and it's faster than the i5-6600K thanks to Hyper-Threading and higher clockspeeds, but for multitasking and other demanding tasks we prefer getting at least a 6-core processor. The i7-5930K, i7-6850K, i7-5960X, and i7-6900K are also worth at least a thought—never mind the i7-6950X—but the i7-5820K and i7-6800K end up being the most compelling due to their lower prices. We ended up going with the newcomer, given its updated architecture and slightly faster performance, but it's basically a toss-up between the two.

The stock base and turbo clocks of the 6800K are relatively tame, about on par with the i5-6600K, but the architecture isn't quite as potent so gaming is usually a hair slower. Having lower stock clocks on the other hand means more potential for overclocking, so where an i7-6700K might only get a 500MHz (12 percent) boost in clockspeed, the 6800K can get an extra 800MHz (22 percent). The catch is that power requirements scale quickly with all six cores running full tilt—under full CPU load, the i7-6800K uses about 40W more than the i7-6700K at stock, but with both chips at maximum overclocks the 6-core part uses 75W more power.

Multi-GPU considerations

What about SLI and CrossFire performance? Your choice of motherboard plays a role, as some boards include extra PCIe lanes via PLX chips. That means with the right motherboard, you can still get dual PCIe x16 Gen3 slots even with a 28 lane CPU—or a 16 lane Skylake chip. For SLI, data transfers can go GPU-to-GPU without routing back to the CPU, so the PLX chip does end up helping. However, boards with PLX chips often bump the price up nearly as much as going from the i7-6800K to the i7-6850K, and the total CPU to PCIe slot bandwidth remains the same.

Regardless, having dual x16 slots helps with transferring frames and other data between graphics cards, and using a pair of Nvidia's GTX 1080 GPUs, we've seen gains of 10-15 percent running an i7-6850K compared to an i7-6800K. We're still working on additional tests with various GPUs, but if you're serious about grabbing a pair of GTX 1080 cards, we recommend shelling out for at least an i7-6850K processor.

How we tested and other processors

If our focus seems to have been predominantly on Intel's latest Skylake CPUs, along with their Broadwell-E and Haswell-E offerings, there's a reason for that. They're the fastest processors right now, and until AMD's Zen debuts in early 2017 (maybe late 2016?) things are unlikely to change. However, Intel's chips aren't the only CPUs we tested. We've run a suite of benchmarks on several of AMD's FM2+ APUs and AM3+ CPUs, along with conducting research on older CPUs.

We have four current test platforms, along with results from a few other older platforms that we no longer actively test. The motherboards used in testing are the Asus Z170-A for Skylake, MSI X99A Gaming Pro Carbon for Broadwell-E and Haswell-E, Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 for the AMD FX chips, and Gigabyte F2A88X-UP4 for FM2+ APUs. All systems used SSD storage, 16GB of memory, and liquid cooling on the CPU.

We measured performance in a variety of games using both GTX 1080 and GTX 980 graphics cards. The current gaming suite consists of eight games running at 1080p Ultra settings, with 4xMSAA where applicable and FXAA/SMAA otherwise. The games are The Division, Doom, Fallout 4, Far Cry Primal, Grand Theft Auto 5, Hitman, Rise of the Tomb Raider, and The Witcher 3, though we also performed limited testing of Ashes of the Singularity and Total War: Warhammer. While 1080p isn't the most demanding resolution these days, we wanted to give the CPUs a bit of room to show their stuff—running at 1440p and 4K typically ends up testing GPU performance more than anything, and 1080p Ultra is a good compromise.

Besides gaming tests—because really, no PC is going to be purely for gaming—we also ran general system and processor performance. Our test suite includes Cinebench R15 (in both single-threaded and multi-threaded modes), x264 HD 5.0.1 (both passes), HwBot's x265 test, y-cruncher, PCMark 8, VeraCrypt, and 7-zip. Along with these benchmarks, we also use each processor as a 'normal' user, surfing the web, installing some applications, writing, etc. to see if there's anything else we notice that doesn't specifically show up in the benchmarks.

The Competition

Without getting too bogged down in the details, the following are other processors that we've tested and researched in selecting the best gaming processors. We've included a short summary of each chip.

AMD's Athlon X4 860K, Athlon X4 870K, and Athlon X4 880K are budget offerings that take AMD's APUs and disable the graphics portion of the chip. The Core i3-6100 ends up being up to 50 percent faster using a graphics card like the RX 480 or GTX 980. The A10-7890K and A10-7870K are the APU versions with graphics, but the integrated graphics just isn't fast enough to handle most modern games.

AMD's FX series of processors are power hungry and can't usually match the performance of Intel's Core i5 line. The FX-6350 and FX-8370 were tested and represent the most common options. The lower power FX-8320E and FX-8370E cost more while performing a bit worse, while the FX-9370 and FX-9590 cost even more and consume an insane 220W under load.

Intel's previous generation i7-4790K and i5-4690K are nearly as fast as Skylake in gaming performance, but they're also the same price as Skylake's i5-6600K and i7-6700K. If you have one of these, great, but we wouldn't recommend buying a new LGA1150 part at this time (unless you already have an LGA1150 motherboard and DDR3 memory, or the price is exceptionally attractive).

The Intel Core i5-6600K is our overall pick for the best gaming processor. See above. If you need a step up, the Core i7-6700K handles multi-threaded tasks better, but most games won't benefit much if at all. For a step down, the Core i5-6400 and i5-6500 deliver very close to the same level of gaming performance at a lower price point.

The Core i3-6100 delivers very nearly the same performance as the i5-6600K at roughly half the price and earns our pick as the best budget gaming processor. There are chips that cost less, but they end up being too big of a compromise on performance.

Intel's Haswell-E i7-5820K, i7-5930K, and i7-5960X have been superseded by the new Broadwell-E i7-6800K, i7-6850K,and i7-6900K—along with the current king-of-the-hill 10-core i7-6950X. Details on each processor can be found in our Broadwell-E Review, along with individual reviews of the i7-6800K, i7-6850K, i7-6900K, and i7-6950X review. All of these are very much high-end processors, and they serve a purpose, but for gaming we recommend sticking with the Core i7-6800K—or move up to the i7-6850K if you need the extra PCIe lanes for SLI or CrossFire.

A note on affiliates: some of our stories, like this one, include affiliate links to stores like Amazon. These online stores share a small amount of revenue with us if you buy something through one of these links, which helps support our work evaluating PC components.